Pages

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

When to say enough

We have all done it: gone back over our work again and again, tweaking this, changing that.Like the child who hands you a fairly well done piece of artwork only to take it back, to fix it. The resulting piece given to you is loud, jumbled and overdone, if only they had stopped when it was something recognizable.

I find myself in the same predicament. I have overwritten the same paragraph so many times that it barely resembles what was originally intended. The other day I went back to my original journal for inspiration and found that the passage I had written prior to all of my revisions was actually much better than the one now in place. This led me to reread the entire rough copy; what else had I missed, left out in the re-writing process? So I write this to those who may be reading this blog: Have you experienced this and if so, when do you say enough is enough?